Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Once again my thanks to poet and translator Mario Domínguez Parra for translating and helping place four of my prose poems (Sentences, 1976) in the literary supplement El Perseguidor of the newspaper Diario de Avisos, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands.

Monday, April 11, 2011

Wherein we are transported 26 years back in time to read a review of some books of poetry and in the process come upon Miss Marianne Moore weeding out the image of a toad—together with a host of other likewise lively conceits—as welcome additions to her magical word garden, but I’m with Pinsky and a slew of other poets and critics who think Miss Moore should have left the toad in the poem. But then again, perhaps she was afraid of coming down with warts.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Issued in 1992, an 18 x 25 cm set of eighteen matchboxes illustrating the fables of Ivan Krylov bought at the Kopanaki open-air market some years back from Pontic Greek immigrants from the former USSR. Yours truly being a pushover for fairy tales and fables, how could I not buy this exquisite little item once I saw it among all the other paraphernalia this family had brought with them to Greece?

Fables included are The Broom, The Cat and the Cook, The Cock and the Pearl, The Cuckoo and the Cock, The Dragonfly and the Ant, The Eagle and the Mole, The Elephant and the Pug, The Fox and the Grapes, The Industrious Bear, The Lion and the Fox, The Mirror and the Monkey, The Monkey and the Spectacles, The Quartet, The Raven and the Fox, The Swan, the Pike and the Crayfish, The Swine under the Oak, The Two Dogs, The Wolf and the Stork.

Bio Degradable

Born in Greece, I was taken at the age of four to the small town of Raymond, WA in 1948. After high school, I attended the University of Washington but dropped out after a year, spent 1963-1964 travelling in Europe and in Greece, settling in Munich until getting drafted into the US Army. After my discharge, I completed my sophomore year at GHC, Aberdeen, WA, then transferred to the UW where I received an MA in English. In 1970, I co-founded the poetry magazine Madrona and also worked for the Seattle Housing Authority before returning to Greece in 1972. I married Eleni in 1980 and we have a daughter, Efiniki, 32, and a son, Anastasios, 30. I'm now semi-retired from teaching ESL in my language school in Meligalas but still writing poetry--which I've been doing for the last forty years. My poems have been published in various literary magazines in the US and abroad. A number of my poems were also included in the anthology How The Net Is Gripped: a selection of contemporary American Poetry (Stride, UK, 1992), and I have two collections of poetry, Sentences (Querencia Books, 1976), and Aural (Singing Horse Press, 1984).